Here comes Hurricane Eliot, blowing at Force 5 and headed💞 straight for the Cuomo administratio♏n.
Will it make landfall?
Will Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor on a mission of self-redemption, defeat the still slightly shell-sho🐬cked Manhattan borough president, Scott Stringer, in Tuesday’s Democratic primary f🐠or New York City comptroller?
The polls have it too close to call. Stringer has the unequivocal support of the New York Democratic establishment, and Spitzer has no allies other than those his family fortune can buy. So the question is this: Can the old guar💧d pull out enough votes to elect its man, a onetime backbench state assemblyman? Who no one outside Manhattan has ever heard of? Or will name-recognition and big bucks carry the day for Spitzer?
If so, Spitzer will take office owing nobody of consequence anything — which is another way of saying he’ll be fre🌱e to settle 🦹old scores by the boatload.
And that♈ he will do, with gusto, predict a half-dozen veteran Spitzer watchers — not one of them willing to publicly cross a man on the cusp of r👍egaining real power, a man who long ago raised vendetta to an art form.
Tꩲhey expect him to be a particular vexation to Gov. Cuom✱o.
Cuomo succeeded Spitzer as state attorney general in 2007, when the latter became governor. Nobody ⭕thought Albany was going to be big enough for the two of them, and it wasn’t.
Spitzer, his lean frame wrapped around the soul of a woꩲlverine, had bludgeoned his way to notoriety as attorney general. And that was the course he chose as governor.
It didn’t work. From day one, he was at war wi💫th the Legislature — discovering soon enough that the lawmakers weren’t as susceptible to bullying as the acutely publicity-averse fo𝓰lks who populate Wall Street.
They fought back — which in part caused Spitzer to deploy state troop𒀰ers against then-Se💦nate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno. But Cuomo quite publicly called a halt to that embarrassment, accelerating a dizzying fall in the polls for Spitzer and in some ways greasing the skids for his eventual resignation.
The former governor has not forgotten that.
“Eliot has🍃 Andrew’s picture taped to his bathroom mirror,” says one Albany operator. “Every morning he stares at it and says, ‘Hello. My name is Eliot Spitzer. Prepare to die!’ ”
Now, it would seem that opportunities for reﷺvenge are scarce. Sp🧸itzer is seeking citywide office, after all, and that has nothing to do with Albany.
Except that it does. Or it can be construed to — and that’s an opening an 🌌accomplished opportꦰunist like Spitzer would negotiate without difficulty.
“The first thing I will do is audit the MTA to ensure that your🦩 dollars are spent wisely and that the cost of commuting remains as low as possible,” Spitzer said last month.
N💝ever mind that the MTA is a state agency, and thus none of the city comptroller’s business.
No standing? No problem.
“Everybody thinks the city runs the trains, or the s🐎ubways anyway,” says a politically attuned city infrastructure expert. “Of course Eliot will have his auditors all over the Transit Authority, and if Cuomo says no, they’ll go right to court.”
And to the press-release printer, too, the point being to embarrass the governor and rebuild the Spitzer legend. Never min𒈔d that the effect will be to be erode public confidence in a vital utility, which actually works pret✅ty well.
Such thuggery paid dividends for Spitzer when he used the Martin Act like a club on Wall Street — coercing surrenders left and right𓆏, but never achieving an actual courtroom win.
So look for Spitzer to take another whack at Wall Street — leveraging the comptroller’s position as a principal custodian of t✱he city’s five public pension funds to vex old enemies and to make new ones. If that undౠermines investor confidence in New York, what does that matter?
“Pension fund activism is a big deal today. All the politicians are doing it, and I’d expect Spitzer to try to ally with other big public funds,” said a consultant with Wall Street clients. “He would start with $140 billion and could easily get it up over a trillion. It would get him a lot of press, but it probꦯably wouldn’t do the funds much good.”
That is, it would be a fundamental breach of fiduciary responsibility, but it would certainly raise Spitzer’s profile in New York — especially if he can coerce state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli,💞 no Cuomo ally, into bringing the state’s $165 billion fund into the game.
Cuomo wouldn’t be Spitzer’s only target, of course. New York’s neཧxt mayor would find him hovering over city government like a malign helicopter — picking high-publicity targets and proceeding with his customary recklessness.
Frankly, it would be different if Spitzerꦑ were anything other than what he is. There are no end of nooks and crannies 🧔in New York that need high candle-power inquiries — and there is no reasonable expectation that Scott Stringer will undertake any.
But there is also no reason to believe that Eliot Spitzer will act in anything other than his person🍸al best interests. History proclaims precisely the opposite, and New York — both city and state — will pay a heavy price if the former 🔯governor achieves his comeback.
Andrew ꦍCuomo will suffer most, but he won’t suffer alone.